Mo-Sys tracking for BBC Election 2015

Once again, the BBC has opted for Mo-Sys Engineering’s tracking technology StarTracker for their Election Night studio.

This followed the resounding success of last year’s coverage of the European and local elections using this technology. During the 2014 broadcast, around 23 hours of live election programming came from BBC Studios and Post Production’s Elstree Studio D. Here, the Mo-Sys StarTracker system was attached to three of the studio’s 12 Sony HDC-1500 cameras to create a virtual studio for presenter Jeremy Vine. Using unique reflective discs – ‘stars’ - on the studio ceiling, the system tracked these markers and sent positional information to the graphics engine in order to render the correct viewpoint. This allowed Vine and the cameras to move around the green screen environment without affecting the position of the virtual graphs and charts.

This time around there were 5 StarTrackers, plus an encoded telescopic crane with a Mo-Sys B20 head. In addition, the latest Mo-Sys innovation – SpaceTracker – was employed enabling handheld cameras to be tracked. The impressive result was a graphics presentation that was even more engrossing and immersive for viewers than last years, with Jeremy Vine paving Downing Street, populating seats in the House of Commons and the revival of the Swingometer, this time located in thel bowls of Elisabeth Tower, also known as Big Ben. While SpaceTracker made the map of Britain on the video wall more dynamic, allowing presenter Emily Maitlis to show the voting results for each constituency.

The BBC in Wales also used StarTracker for its Election Night. Here it was mounted to an e-Crane which offered the perfect solution for their smaller studio space.